Imagining impact, and believing in it
“There has to be a better way to do this.” From common roots — intellectual curiosity and the desire to make life just a little bit easier — 64 ideas blossomed this year in the Harvard College Innovation (I3) Challenge. Pursuing innovation not for its own sake alone, but out of a conviction that problems can be solved, students wrought lasting impacts, typically inspired by some challenging life experience. For Majahonkhe Shabangu ’14, a biomedical engineering student from Swaziland, it was something deeply personal: a relative who was living with HIV had stopped taking an essential medication. That’s all too common in patients taking a drug whose side effects can feel worse than the disease itself. But defaulting on a medication can lead to drug resistance, and it can allow HIV to advance or even kill — as it did Shabangu’s relative. During summer internships at a health clinic in South Africa, Shabangu and...